IT WAS AUGUST OF 1927, AND ALREADY I was waking every morning with the thought that the summer was nearly over and that I would soon be back in school. And I thought, as I always did on opening my eyes, “I don’t know how I can go back to Lejac.” And then, there was a very strange happening on the reserve.
One day an old Model T drove into the village. In the car were three men and two women. They said they were doctors and healers from a reserve in the Kootenay area in the south-east section of British Columbia and that they practised medicine in the old Native way. Because they were Natives, and many villagers believed in Native medicine, the people of Stoney Creek trusted them.
I watched as the villagers, some of them my relatives, flocked to the healers. There were people with tuberculosis or arthritis, children whose spines were crippled, young people with twisted bodies who had to be carried to the healers by their parents. I had never seen so many sick and crippled people together in one place in my life; everyone in the village was surprised to see how many Natives needed the help of these healers.
The doctor and his helpers charged some people two dol-lars, some ten or twenty dollars. When the sick person had handed over the money, the doctor would sing in the Native language, and he would put a bottle against the sick part of the person he was healing. The other healers would lay hands on the patient. After a little time had passed, the doctor would show the onlookers the bottle—where before he said it had been empty, now it had many bugs in it.
“See, see how I have taken the sickness out!” he cried.
The Natives of Stoney Creek murmured their amazement as they looked at the bugs in the bottle. Some of them crowded around the doctor and his healers and begged that the bugs be taken out of their wife, their husband, their child.
For three days the healings went on. Then the doctor and his healers jumped in their Model T and left the reserve.
Many people spoke about the wonders that the doctor and his helpers had performed. Everyone was happy. People imagined the village without tuberculosis or arthritis or twisted limbs and spines. It was as if we were celebrating a feast day in the middle of summer.
A few days later, there was no happiness in the village. Many people talked.
“There is no money left in the village,” said one.
“All our money was given to that doctor,” said another.
“My wife spit blood again today.”
“My son still has to be carried—he can’t walk. I paid that doctor twenty dollars to make him walk.”
“I’ll bet the bugs were in the bottle all the time.”
“Wait till we tell Father Coccola about this!”
“You had better not tell him, or our children will be punished when they go back to school. The missionaries don’t like our medicine.”
I listened and I was afraid. Some of my relatives had given money to the Native doctor. I began to shake. I could imagine Sister Superior with the willow switch, standing me up in front of the whole school and thrashing me because my relatives had believed they could be healed in the Carrier way.
I went to my mother. “I am afraid to go back to school. The people in the village say that children of families who went to the healers will be whipped when they go back to Lejac.”
My mother talked to my stepfather. That night she said to me, “I need you to help me. You don’t go back to Lejac.”
I really began to believe that I would never go back to Lejac when, a few days later, we set up camp at Johnny Paul’s hunting grounds on the shore of Cluculz Lake. And oh, it was good to be back there again after so many years, to see Johnny and his brother Gus go off with their guns in the morning, to see Bella and my mother drying fish and scraping hides, to have Mark or one of the other little ones call, “Mary, I’m hungry! Can I have something to eat?”
Still, I was afraid that a visitor might come, and every time a twig snapped or the dog barked, I ran to my mother. Each fall, the Mounties called at hunting grounds to pick up stu-dents who hadn’t returned to Lejac. I knew that Father Coccola would send someone for me. After this small time of freedom and a return to the old days, I felt that I would die if I was taken back to school.
I was not disappointed. When we were at Cluculz Lake two or three days, Constable Bill Manson rode into the camp. I had heard the sound of his horse coming towards us through the bush and I ran to my mother.
“I’ve come to take Mary back to school,” he said.
“I need her to help me,” said my mother.
“She has one more year to go to school. Then she can stay with you and help you,” said the constable.
“No,” my mother said. “I have five little ones and she is the oldest. I won’t send her back.”
The constable talked to my mother for a few more minutes. She repeated the same thing over and over: “I need her to help me. I won’t send her back.” Finally the constable shook his head, turned his horse and rode off, back to where he had come from.
When I saw him disappear into the bush, when I couldn’t hear the sound of his horse, and the dog had gone back to sleep, then I knew that I was safe. I watched my mother move silently around the camp and I whispered to myself over and over, “Now I will never have to leave my mother again.”